This immediately degraded Allied communications, but it was a degradation that could at least in part be compensated for by switching to atmospheric systems as soon as space circuits went out. When the history of the space war comes to be written the part played by the communications managers in the US control centres will be seen to have made a remarkable and decisive contribution to the Allied war effort.
On NATO’s declaration of alert in July 1985, NASA, together with the Department of Defense, urgently reviewed the launch schedules for the space shuttle Orbiter vehicles. Of the five in service, one was available. Of the others, one was on long turn-round for replacement of its thermal tiles; one was having its undercarriage renewed after a heavy landing at Vandenberg AFB; one was on a thirty-day refit and one was in orbit recovering a satellite. The European Space Laboratory was on the ground and not scheduled to be relaunched until later in the year.
At 0600 hours Eastern Standard Time on Friday 2 August the available orbiter (Enterprise 101) was launched from Cape Kennedy with a four-man crew and Colonel ‘Slim’ Wentworth, USAF, in command. It was a multi-purpose mission in which priorities might need to be changed, and a manned craft was the best way of preserving flexibility. Photography and a full range of electronic reconnaissance was required from its regular passes over Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. In addition it was ready with specially prepared tapes in over a dozen languages for propaganda broadcasts, but these would only be ordered if political developments during the mission made it propitious to do so.
As tension heightened towards the end of July the two Big Birds were so manoeuvred as to photograph the likely dispersal sites for the Soviet SS-16 mobile ICBM (inter-continental ballistic missiles). At the same time the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered the readying of two further Big Birds as replacements for any damaged satellites, with priority going to maintaining the electronic surveillance which would be so vital to the Allied ECM campaign if war broke out. He and his colleagues had also ruled that three supplementary navigation satellites should be placed in geostationary orbit 30,000 kilometres up over the Atlantic. This was the system that gave such an astonishing navigational capability and allowed USAF’s F-111 aircraft to be immediately capable of reading out a ground position to an accuracy of twelve metres. It was not thought that these high satellites would be at much risk. They were very difficult to get at, and there must surely be more cost-effective ways of disrupting the system than by days of satellite manoeuvring in order to effect close-range interference. Some corroboration of that view came on 2 August when the FLEETSATCOM (fleet satellite communications) tracking and control station on the eastern seaboard suffered major damage from an undetected saboteur. The very disturbing feature of this was that the damage was done by electronic means and could only have been inflicted by someone with an intimate knowledge of the station and its technology.
The war in space was very much a matter of move and counter-move and the outcome was fairly evenly balanced. The US were all the time concerned to husband their limited number of launchers. On the other hand, their satellites had much more comprehensive and versatile capabilities in space than those of the USSR. Furthermore, with doubling and tripling up of systems they were very resilient to interference and could accept extensive damage on occasions and still usefully carry on their tasks. The key information on Soviet electronic emissions in the Central Region battle area was in fact extracted very rapidly and early on in the war to the great advantage of the Allies. Ballistic missile warning from high satellites was also preserved completely throughout the war. The Soviet system suffered heavily from US interference and from the random effect of its own inherent unreliability and the short life of its vehicles. By dint of frequent replacements the Russians kept up good coverage of the Atlantic and the United States itself, but in the event this was not to give them the same practical advantage that the Allies obtained from their own electronic reconnaissance.
None of this accorded very closely with popular ideas gleaned from the bookstalls and the cinemas, and it was not to be expected that it would. However, there was one incident that came quite near to the science fiction fantasies, and for what it may presage for the future it may be worth recounting here.
Enterprise 101 had been in orbit for forty hours by midnight on 3 August. All her systems were working excellently and she had been discharging regular canisters of exposed film back into the atmosphere for recovery and processing. Colonel Wentworth had not been ordered to start the broadcasts but his spacecraft had been under close observation by the Soviet Union; her missions, on which the Russians were well informed from their own sources in the States, were highly unacceptable to them. Apart from the very real strategic disadvantages to the Soviet Union of this space mission, the Politburo and military alike found it intolerable that four Americans should be able to sweep across their country with impunity ten times a day when they were on the brink of war. But they were well prepared, and had already laid plans for putting Enterprise out of business if they could.
In the early hours of 4 August a Soyuz 49 mission was launched with a two-man crew, and on its fourth orbit the Soyuz craft was manoeuvred to within 150 metres of Enterprise. Wentworth was keeping a visual look-out at that time, and when Mission 49 made its first beam sweep across Enterprise the laser traversed his line of sight and blinded him. The Enterprise crew therefore had plenty on their hands, both in alerting space control as to what was going on and in coping with a blinded and weightless commander. Captain Jensen of the US Navy took over command and ordered an immediate check for further damage. The craft had in fact been subjected to other high energy beam sweeps and the damage check brought gloomy news: their five engine nozzles and their elevons had been damaged, and there was now no possibility of a successful controlled re-entry into the atmosphere. Worst of all, their solar cells seemed to have suffered and electric power generation had ceased. They had a large battery capacity, but Jensen immediately ordered a reduction of all electrical services to the minimum required for life support and for communication with space control.
Space control were reassuring; after a five-minute pause they announced that Enterprise 103, which was now safely back at Vandenberg with her recovered satellite, would be readied with all possible haste and sent up to recover them. Jensen and his crew knew very well that it normally took several days to get one of the orbiters ready for flight again, and they wondered quietly to themselves whether their own batteries would be able to maintain their life support functions until the relief mission could arrive.
But the war was now on, and damage and interference to US surveillance required the two waiting Big Birds to be placed in orbit without delay. Grimly, the Joint Chiefs decided that when Enterprise 103 was ready she must be held for priority satellite replacement. Colonel Wentworth and his crew had left the earth before hostilities started. They spent the duration of the Third World War orbiting in space, and their bodies were recovered on a solemn mission at the end of August 1985. They were the first casualties of the war in space and are buried in Arlington National Cemetery.